Archive for May, 2009

In our edition of eNudge News describing 4 Keys for Business Growth in 2009, the 4th key was:

Mix up the communication & follow up responses: make sure you act in a timely manner when people respond to your communications, don’t forget to occasionally ring your key prospects, or send a hand written note in the mail. In addition, using personalisation (more than just your contact’s first name) in your messages and more targeted special messages outside your regular ‘news’ messages also helps to connect better with your contacts.

Tips for helping you to mix up the messages:

When you’re reading news and industry articles – keep your customers top of mind. If you’re thinking about them (as well as your own interests) as you are reading the news, you will undoubtedly find information that will be very helpful to a customer. Scan the article, and email / fax it out.

If there is a key date in one of your client’s businesses, diarise a week before that date and send a hand-written note, give them a quick call, or send them an email about that date; your communication might be a reminder / a good luck / a ‘yell out if I can help you’ / a congratulations type of message.

In your Christmas message, you can use the unlimited personalisation feature of eNudge to add a personal sentence to each message. Refer to our ‘Extending your Message Personalisation’ tutorial for more details on how to do this.

Consider SMS as the vehicle for sending a special short message to your key clients announcing an important event that is date sensitive / a success you have achieved / a success of one of your clients to which you contributed.

After a meeting with your client, on occasion send a hand-written note thanking them for their time. You can get some great personalised or company branded note cards created for this purpose from Note Côuture.

Tips for helping you follow up inbound responses:

Have a process for how you are going to handle responses, including a script (for a telephone response) or a set of possible written responses, ready before you send out the message that you expect to ellicit a response.

Assign a staff member to handle the responses, and set a time frame in which the responses must be made / sent.

Manage the process to ensure that it is being followed.

It’s very easy to put all your effort into creating the message, and then not having any time left to plan for the response. This is a recipe for handling responses in a tardy or unprofessional manner.

How have you handled large volumes of response from your marketing efforts?